intellectual dark web is a mediocre band name

I. Is "New York Times" the Culture? (Hahahahahahaha. No.)

The article begins by breathlessly reporting that the [Intellectual Dark Web] is rife with "beauty" and "danger." So, what even is it? Here’s the vague rundown: "Most simply, it is a collection of iconoclastic thinkers, academic renegades and media personalities who are having a rolling conversation — on podcasts, YouTube and Twitter, and in sold-out auditoriums — that sound unlike anything else happening, at least publicly, in the culture right now."

Meh. How is this really about intellectualism, darkness, or a special web? If these people are having conversations that are so rare "in the culture," how is it that they have millions of followers and pack auditoriums? (Is "the culture" The New York Times?)

(via Arts & Letters Daily, which is an incomparable web bulletin)

II. Jordan Peterson is a Sophist
Several people have sent me the below takedown (which is pretty great!) of Jordan Peterson.

Count me as someone who thinks Peterson is hardly profound, and yet has captured an audience by (if he has any message) repackaging some traditional values in language as meaning-addled as his opponents. Beyond content, his twist is to give such language overtly religious gravitas. Traditional values still thrive, of course, seeing as marriage remains the ending to every show ever, and domestic bliss (imitated or otherwise) is the cornerstone of both Marvel movies and The Office. Maybe such values aren't as default, but the somewhat specious fears of trads can be reviewed another time.

Anyway. Peterson often talks about neo-Marxism and postmodernism with the sort of reductive glee of someone too Important to cite actual examples or discuss discrete phenomena and thinkers. And yet, I mean, I was taught basically that post-structuralism did upend traditional meaning and had permeated culture (or should!) and also, er, hasn't everyone been calling Trump the postmodern president? Maybe these terms have become loosed from concrete definitions by overuse (employed both too often and too broadly), but Peterson is responding to vapid intellectualism with his own vapid intellectualism. It's a culture war, always, but to the extent that the academy has enabled a bunch of fuzzy bulls**t to pass as scholarly precision, many of the leftist academics decrying Peterson should recognize him as one of their own. That he's a successful academic should make this obvious, and yet people keep tripping over themselves to insult his over-worked grandiloquence. Bad news, Dr. Angry-Lit, because your treatise on the disembodied mind by way of a Foucauldian reading of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde probably has some overworked nonsense which helped create such a norm.

The truth is that Peterson is a faulty idea-cannon and even if he's not an idiot, per se, how many of these "charismatic, vibes of toxic masculinity" dudes do we need to suffer just because they're self-confident? I'm thinking specifically of my friends who used to champion Mark Driscoll. As a pastor, a leader, a thinker, Driscoll was always suspect. He wasn't robust, he was a bully. That was clear from how he addressed and discussed human relationships! Now we have Peterson, who isn't profound, but who has just enough affect and learning to convince a swath of (self-described) unsettled young (white) men to follow whatever truism he's dressed up with lobster-talk.

I don't mean to devolve into another Trumpian autopsy of "What phenomenon created these bad followers (besides, like, racism and abortion)?" Even so, I still think that careful, reflective thinking is the easiest way to dissect purveyors of nonsense as adroit, misguided, and frustrating as Peterson. Jokes are good, too, but honestly, it feels like too many smart people are happy with jokes because they're too lazy to make an argument. Social media have given real weight to jokes. If something gets a thousand retweets, two thousand likes, it must have meaning. It must be doing something (we lie to ourselves).

Uh, anyway, read the whole takedown, but this part is good:

How does one even address material like this? It can’t be “refuted.” Are we ruled by a dragon of chaos? Is the dragon feminine? Does “the ‘state’ of preconscious paradise” have a “voluntary encounter with the unknown”? Is the episodic really more explicit than the procedural? These are not questions with answers, because they are not questions with meanings.

III. Detroit Isn't Dead, Also Isn't Resurrected
I don't know anything about Detroit or how to fix bankrupt cities or solve rampant local corruption or replace dying industries with enduring industries that don't then turn those cities into jackass havens like Silicon Valley (and increasingly Denver, apparently); oh, and neither does this article! But it's a really great piece of reporting about a successful journalist working as a fix-it guy at one of his favorite local restaurants in Detroit. It's not (supposedly) a stunt. He gets healthcare through the job and he's laying low reportage-wise. The writer of the article and the writer profiled are people I never really read, but they're good here.

[Charlie LeDuff] took [his personal aggrievement] out on corrupt public “servants,” of which Detroit’s always had a parodic surfeit. (One city councilwoman demanded 17 pounds of sausage as part of her bribe.) He wrote of “dead flight,” the living exhuming their dead to take them to the suburbs, where the cemeteries were safer. He found a body at the bottom of an elevator shaft in an abandoned building, frozen in ice, as ruin-crashers played pickup hockey nearby. The man had been there for weeks, his legs jutting out like popsicle sticks. 

IV. Abbreviated Literature
A cartoonist abbreviates classic literature, including the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (picture below). 
Just as good, or better, are his versions of The Grapes of Wrath and The Great Gatsby. (The Grapes of Wrath is a trash book and honestly the linked cartoon is less of a caricature of Oklahomans than the novel. Perfect case of a culturally important text to be celebrated for its impact and damned for its art. Possible to do both, IMO. Cool, so I love all of you and hope you're well. Happy June!)